Knightley and Carell in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.

Don’t worry about floods, earthquakes or burning to death in an apocalyptic fire. When the end comes, protect yourself with love. This is the message conveyed in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, writer-director Lorene Scafaria’s feature film debut. It’s an intriguing take on the apocalypse as a pragmatic tone poem, with comedian Steve Carell in his first deeply dramatic role (at least, the first one I’ve seen). He is very touching and unexpectedly appealing, and with co-star Keira Knightley he exhibits a romantic chemistry of which I never thought him capable.

An asteroid named Matilda 70-miles wide is hurling toward planet Earth and is expected to collide in 21 days. Cell phones are useless. Water and power are cut off. People trying to escape the cities are trapped in endless gridlock. Life has lost all meaning, and the final flights on commercial airlines have just left the ground, signalling the demise of air travel forever. Mr. Carell plays Dodge, an insurance salesman, who watches the unfolding tragedy on the network news with a mixture of horror and resignation, while his wife simply leaps from the car and leaves him on the spot. He’s introverted and already bruised by life. Now he faces death alone. “This is the Titanic,” says his best friend, “and there’s not a life boat in sight.”

Enter Penny, a flaky downstairs neighbor in his apartment building he’s always carefully avoided—neurotic, extroverted, resistant to reality. Secretly, she’s been withholding Dodge’s mail and now she delivers a letter from his long-lost high-school sweetheart. Distraught and clueless as to where to turn next, the two strangers who have met accidentally join forces and hit the highway to find his old lover in New Jersey, then travel on to locate Penny’s family in Maryland. The movie chronicles their road trip and introduces the characters they meet along the way—a man they hitch a ride with who speeds up his suicide with the help of a hired assassin, the partygoers in a roadside diner where the staff serves an orgy to desperate, oversexed customers, a highway cop determined to uphold the law right up to the final blackout by writing up a speeding ticket. Penny locates an old boyfriend living in a fallout shelter with enough potato chips to last another six months. Dodge gets as far as a reunion with the estranged father he hasn’t seen in years (Martin Sheen). The movie shows how perspectives change—or remain the same—in the face of ultimate tragedy. There is room for tears, mixed with unexpected humor. As the final blackout approaches and the TV stations leave the airwaves with one final test pattern, the announcer reminds everyone watching to set their clocks ahead for Daylight Savings Time.

This is an unusual film, resistant to the usual end-of-mankind clichés. The script is full of surprises, even when the parts don’t always come together with the desired impact. The pace sometimes drags, and the focus wavers. Yet the film asks a lot of valid, disturbing questions to which Lorene Scafaria’s screenplay provides no easy answers. What would you do? Take up smoking again? Drink all the vodka in the liquor cabinet? Eat every fattening food the nutrition Nazis warn about? Have sex with anyone you want because “nobody is anybody’s anything anymore?” In the overlapping hours of their search, Dodge and Penny find a new definition of love that is irresistibly moving. If nothing else, see it for the two central performances. Keira Knightley finds a role without a trace of her usual glamour, while Steve Carell finally stretches his talents with more depth and quiet thoughtfulness than he’s ever been invited to previously display.

After so many hellish apocalypse movies, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is intelligent, dignified and emotionally satisfying. The message is simple. If the end is inevitable, then it’s better to face it with your arms around someone you love than alone and forlorn in an empty bed. The choices you make can lead to something oddly akin to optimism.

rreed@observer.com

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

Running Time 101 minutes

Written and Directed by Lorene Scafaria

Starring Steve Carell, Keira Knightley and Melanie Lynskey

3/4

Damon.

It is often predicted that the world will no longer end with the whimper of a long, boring war, but with the scream of a fatal, incurable and fast-moving plague. Addressing that theme in time to scare the living daylights out of everybody, Contagion is a star-studded, apocalyptic wake-up call to the horrors that await mankind in a test tube. We’ve made so much progress in terms of immunology, technology, scientific research and medical miracles that the planet considers itself immune to everything from small pox to swine flu. But there’s still no cure for cancer or AIDS, and the canvas of new viruses gets broader every year. So the topicality in Contagion is dark and unquestionable, if not creepy and off-putting. Tracking the global spread of an infectious virus that leads to deadly brain hemorrhages with no vaccine, writer Scott Burns and maverick director Steven Soderbergh have jump-started the serious fall movie season with an ambitious project that packs a wallop without much guarantee of commercial success. We have enough to worry about already; this movie says why bother, since we’re all doomed anyway.

Telling a complex story in a coherent narrative arc has never been one of Mr. Soderbergh’s strengths, and chronicling the day-by-day panic of a killer virus jumps all over the place. Melding elements from diverse sources, the film has a documentary quality that wastes the talents of an impressive A-list cast. The bubonic plague epidemic that wiped out half of Europe in the Middle Ages was finally traced to a contaminated well in a town square. To discover the origin of the mutating horror in Contagion you have to wait until  the very last scene. The trajectory actually begins with Day 2. Feeling ill, a jet-lagged Gwyneth Paltrow returns to Minneapolis from a business trip in Hong Kong with a strange cough that leads to a migraine headache. Before her husband (Matt Damon) has time to properly welcome her home, she goes into a seizure, foams at the mouth, and dies in the E.R. Their son is the next victim. Like wildfire, the sickness spreads to the people she met on her trip who begin to gag, sweat and faint from Tokyo to Texas. As the cases multiply, so do the guest stars. At the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, health official Laurence Fishburne puts Kate Winslet, a leading doctor in the field of communicable diseases, in harm’s way to investigate the outbreaks with mortally toxic results. Meanwhile, at World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva, researcher Marion Cotillard tries to trace the virus back to its origins in Asia, where she is kidnapped. Isolating people exposed to the virus is hard enough, but how do you quarantine 98 million people in China?

As the plague gains momentum, Homeland Security clocks in, suspecting bioterrorism and requesting sample vaccines to be injected into the drinking water like fluoride. Schools close. Naturally, as in all international crises, there are always the profiteers. After Laurence Fishburne is ordered by the Food and Drug Administration to keep research a secret, Elliot Gould shows up as a scientist who defies the shutdown of his research lab, growing the virus himself and taking credit for a medical breakthrough in print. Meanwhile, Jude Law enters the national radar as a sleazy journalist who makes millions by peddling a false cure in the form of a homeopathic treatment called forsythia. Mr. Soderbergh illumines every shadowy corner of this global pandemic with hypothetical examples of what to expect in an actual case of germ warfare. The Secret Service escorts the president out of Washington,  through an underground passage. Banks, gas stations and public transportation collapse. Nurses go on strike. Hospital generators expire. Pharmacies are looted for bogus serums. Evacuation routes are blocked. Cities are looted and left in trash piles. And while the volume of misinformation builds, here’s a contemporary anxiety to mull over: in the age of Twitter, Facebook and the Internet, it’s easier to reduce an entire civilization to hysterics than ever before. None of the fragmented subplots are followed to a satisfying conclusion. Even after Jennifer Ehle, as a dedicated and heroic lab researcher, ignores government approvals and permissions for human experiments and tests a trial vaccine on herself, inoculations are determined by national lottery depending on birth dates.

Juggling multiple plotlines proved successful in Mr. Soderberg’s Traffic (and even more so in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s vastly superior Babel). Here, the conceit just seems jagged and annoying, without achieving the desired synchronicity. The film often looks like a lengthy public health announcement on the requirements for travel vaccinations. A lot of the medical technology in the dialogue is too technical for the lay mind to grasp.  Who knows from “viral protein cells”? Do stick around for the epilogue—a clever re-enactment of how the virus started, and an explanation of Day 1. The ensemble cast is excellent, if underused. And some of it is downright gasp-inducing, especially when the characters see Gwyneth Paltrow’s lovely head open and the scalp pulled down over her eyes on the operating table. I found Contagion both flawed and fascinating, but it’s not an entertainment.

rreed@observer.com

CONTAGION

Running Time 105 minutes

Written by Scott Z. Burns

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Starring Matt Damon, Kate Winslet and Jude Law

2.5/4

It's not surprising, considering the near-nihilism of Von Trier's filmography — especially 2009's Antichrist, a torture chamber of psychological pain (not to mention clitoral circumcision and penile bludgeoning) depicting the dissolution of a marriage between Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg after the death of their child.

In his latest, it's the last days of Earth, as a rogue planet christened Melancholia hurtles through the solar system on a weaving, waltz-like path towards destruction. Before everyone realizes the end is nigh, though, life isn't so much futile as it is just severely disappointing.

In the first half of the film, Kirsten Dunst plays a bride whose wedding day turns terribly, terribly sour when her chronic depression gets the better of her and sabotages the event. As the second half unspools, Gainsbourg (serving a second tour of duty with the director) does her best to reconcile the now-confirmed destruction of the human race. Dunst, meanwhile, accepts their fate with an almost beatific told-ya-so calm.

"It's not so much a film about the end of the world, it's a film about a state of mind," said Von Trier at the press conference following the screening. Naming a galactic rock after one's own neurosis certainly cements his point. But all of Von Trier's work has more to do with states of mind than anything resembling reality — his tales are full of sadistic plot twists and metaphorical red herrings. If anything, Melancholia is far more straightforward and even earnest, which makes it seem like the most honest movie Von Trier has ever done.

The director is a renowned artistic prankster-he also confessed to being a Nazi in front of the international press today and suggested that he was prepping a 3-hour porn film starring Dunst and Gainsbourg "with lots of uncomfortable sex." But it seems Von Trier can't tackle a topic like depression with anything but a straight face. 

Amid the volatility in the markets, wealthy individuals and big institutions are flocking to hedge funds that buy so-called catastrophe bonds and other investments tied to the probability of Gulf Coast hurricanes, Japanese earthquakes, large snowfalls in Canada and other natural disasters.

Insurers are selling these bonds to investors. If the world remains peaceful and calm, buyers of the bonds get a healthy return, but they can lose their shirts if all hell breaks loose. The Times says the bonds are mainly a vehicle for investors to diversify ...

Catastrophe bonds and other insurance-related securities have no correlation to the broader markets. In 2008, the Swiss Re catastrophe bond index rose 2.3 percent, compared with a loss of 38 percent in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index. The catastrophe bond index returned 10.5 percent from 2007 through 2010, compared with an 11 percent fall in the S.&P.

... but we can't help but wonder if the insurance companies are really selling these securities as a play on the coming boom in the fire-and-brimstone markets.

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor